What’s the Problem With School Time?

“Imagine…Say, home-building. So we bring in the contractor and say, “We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can.” Two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, “Oh, the concrete’s still wet right over there. That part’s not quite up to code. I’ll give it an 80%.” You say, “Great! That’s a C. Let’s build the first floor.” Same thing. Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you’re building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. The idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite.”

-Sal Khan, TED Talk

The previous article in this series discussed the shortcomings of traditional validation of high school graduation. I pointed to the conventional high school transcript as an achievement record accomplished within an array of standard time boxes. From that, I showed how these standard time frames create damaging inequities of access and engagement in learning for many students. This structure poses a roadblock to the current widespread interest in “personalized learning.”

A More Equitable Orientation for Student Learning

If we want authentic learning across disciplines, there are two broad arenas that must be considered. We must personalize the time it takes for any individual student to learn what must be learned, and what can be imagined and created. We must also engage students through projects into which they can authentically plug the assets they’ve already acquired from their backgrounds, experiences, and skills — and from which they can extend their learning, which then becomes relevant to themselves.

Time and Competency-based Learning

Let’s start with the structuring of time. Reform tweaks within traditional time blocks are not meeting the needs of all students in today’s diverse enrollments. That approach for achieving standard knowledge goals stymies initiative, creativity, self-actualization, and resilience for a future changing at an exponentially rapid pace. Today’s older educational leaders could never have imagined such rapid changes when they were young.

As in the opening scenario above, rather than fitting learning into fixed time blocks, consider time to be the variable and what is to be learned the fixed element that drives what and how time is applied. Content and its mastery will always be debated (and in subsequent articles I will), but for this discussion, I accept that there are things we hold as essential learning for students on their way to graduation. Think about how competency-based learning would work in this framework. Equity would require different amounts of time for each student in personalized learning, rather than the factory model of standardized time blocks. It would allow students to move as quickly through content levels as they are able, and more slowly as they need to with content that is difficult.

This may seem impossible, especially from the perspective of time in which many reform projects are born. That’s why the changes discussed in this series constitute a paradigm shift. And that is possible, realistic, and urgently necessary.

To become possible, then, what does this reorientation to time mean in practice? If we are really talking about personalized learning, and if we understand that competency-based learning is a key, what are some characteristics of this shift?

• “Personalized learning,” and indeed, competency-based learning itself, can’t just be stuffed into existing standard time boxes.
• An entirely different orientation to time would be needed in school learning architecture. This means massive shifts away from standard class periods, semester and/or year boundaries for fixed quanta of curricula, school-based master schedules of periods and classes, district “on time to graduate” ratings of schools, and district digital management systems based on time frames.
• Standards and curricula developed with standard time frame assumptions must in the short term be translated in use to levels of knowledge rather than be framed in terms of grade levels. In the long term, standards and curricula must be revised to articulate levels of learning, which all teachers and students can access. Many children already understand learning levels with the video games they play.
• If standards of knowledge and skills continue to be important in education, then certification of graduation must be defined specifically by a graduate profile of such competencies rather than a list of classes a student has passed.
• Appropriate adaptation of digital-assisted learning must be employed which supports students’ individual progress through content and skills by competence. Many online programs are already available for this. Some have been created for remediation and credit-recovery used for students who are “behind.” These can instead be purposed from the start as tools for students acquiring competencies.
• Any independent computer-based assisted learning must engage students with each other.

Competency-based Learning and Project-based Learning

Personalized learning must not be confused with siloed independent learning. Learning must be shared, challenged, and made practical in social and authentic, collaborative contexts. As the complement to competency-based learning, project-based learning fulfills it by:

• Engaging students in real-world problems with creativity, resilience, and solution-building.
• Learning and observing what each student’s assets are. Standardized time pressures rarely allow that.
• Directly employing students’ process of acquiring knowledge and skill competencies.
• Both promoting and elevating students’ acquiring of competencies to personal meaning and practical action.
• Activating either specific disciplinary product goals or interdisciplinary applications.
• Teaching students to listen to, respect, draw upon, and employ differing assets, opinions, perspectives, and challenges from their peers.
• Developing capacities for teamwork, which should be a competency of the graduation profile.
• Allowing collaboration among students within a range of competency levels.

Only Part of the Whole Shift

Considerations of competency- and project-based learning within this new orientation to time can’t work without other significant shifts. I continue to discuss these in my upcoming columns by challenging other outdated and inequitable assumptions that still drive “school.” These will include presumptions about school buildings; district, principal, and teacher roles; student movement, voice, and creativity in standards-driven teaching and learning; and community and government awareness, expectations, and decisions.